Speaking on RTHK’s Backchat programme, Hui said a clearing house had been operating since July and had already seen a large amount of gold deposited.
By the end of the year, he added, HKEX would announce details of renminbi (RMB) gold futures, with a clearing system to be formally launched in the first quarter of next year.
Hui said the goal is to combine the strengths of the world’s three existing gold trading hubs — the UK, the US and Switzerland — into a single platform.
“What we hope to achieve is with this change in geopolitics and also with the growing desire for investors to diversify, they can within the Asia time zone find these three functions together in Hong Kong,” he said.
“We have storage with clearing, at the same time we have futures traded here and also we have refinery. And that’s exactly what we are aiming at in our overall gold development plan.”
On the internationalisation of the RMB, Hui said Hong Kong had been continuously expanding the offshore RMB pool and creating more use cases for the currency.
Hui added the plan to let mainland investors buy and sell Hong Kong-listed stocks directly in RMB through the Stock Connect scheme is good for both investors and the market.
It makes trading more convenient and would bring greater liquidity in the future, he explained.
